adieu

Adieu is French for farewell. You might ask, what is a French word doing in an English dictionary? Good question.

Don’t get me wrong, despite not speaking French, I think it’s a beautiful, romantic language. If a woman speaks to me with a Parisian French-sounding accent I melt. Because I know only few dozens words and I often can’t distinguish them in a sentence when a francophone woman breezes through a conversation she could be telling me to drop dead, but I wouldn’t know and I’d still fall immediately in love and/or lust.

(Actually, I do know that mort is the French word for dead. So, no matter whatever other words may surround mort as she speaks to me, if I hear mort I’m going to begin to expect that my chances of getting lucky are near zero. Then again, I always expect that.)

With my love of French accents stated, I go back to my original question. Why is adieu in the dictionary, but not many other French words? I guess it comes down to the dictionary editor’s estimate of how frequently the word is used by anglophones. Many English-speakers use French words because they add a certain je ne sais quoi to their conversations. Adieu is one of them.

That’s all I have to say about the word adieu. Adieu.

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